Google did it again, well i heard about it an year back in news when an engineer at Google had figured out a way to track exact location of a cell phone user without the authorization or knowledge of cell phone network carrier. It did seem like hoax and still does because if Google can do such a thing without the knowledge of cellular network carrier then its a big privacy concern as Google is not CIA and its not a Govt entity as i am sure Govt. and Intelligence agencies can do that without our permission but if a private company does it then its violation of my privacy. BBC does talk about it and you might want to read it as well.

Any how getting back to the new product Google just launched called Google Latitude. As the name suggests Google Latitude helps you track your friends location either via web or thorough your cell phone.  For cell phone users first you have to install Google Maps and there you will get an option to first allow to share your location with any one of your friend. If you friend is using Google Maps on his phone or is on his computer using Google Map he would be able to find out where you are and in return can send you an sms or call you up. The two sided communication needs Google Maps to be running 24/7 which is quite expensive on a cell phone as i only open Google Maps when i am looking for some location rather then keep it open for the sake of opening it does cost bandwidth.

Though the information shared is also not known to be 100% accurate and my guess is that the information is tracked with the help of your cell phone internet connection maybe its IP , server and provider of course that can be easily traced which can give an approximate location and bypass the cellular network carrier.

Unfortunately i could not test it as that application is so far restricted to 27 countries only in which Pakistan is not yet included. I would love to know if some one in US could check it out and give a feedback.

So this was a normal morning i woke up, had my coffee and started to spider around the internet checked my RSS and landed on a very interesting article by Profy stating ” Which of the Closed Google Services will you really miss“. Well for a moment the title was a bit concerning as i asked WTF is Google shutting down ! Well no not yet but the prediction did show a little down time for Google as well, which can be seen from their official blog posts on “Changes to Recruitment” and few left and right reads on the Google lay off and acceptance of Drop in Ad Revenue.

So far if i see the internet from a specific angle indeed Google have given allot in terms of Internet, it really is responsible for a bunch of companies to run their business, it do help companies make money from Ad Revenue, Google Apps and of course on daily bases we do see a huge chunk of Google for our regular search queries. New business called SEO consultancies and SEO companies are bi product of Google Search Engine. For Me if i talk personally well Google is part of my life , my mail, my search, my rss its all on Google.

The Question still stands “What if Google Collapse” What if the Credit crunch hit Google and its Ad Revenue starts to take the fall. Well there might be tiny possibility of that a huge prediction that it might happen.

Well the first scenario that is going to cause this collapse is the drop in Google Ad Revenue, meaning Advertisers pulling out their money from Google Adwords well its possible City Group, Ford, Toyota all are suffering they will pull out their money from their ad revenue if not pull out they will decrease their ad revenue based on their profit. Drop in Ad Revenue means drop in Google stocks thus starting up a chain reaction of lay offs initially and cutting down of certain products, few free services like Google Apps free edition, or other business services Google offer might disappear, don’t worry gMail wont go. This chain reaction will force google to cut down on the publishers and may be only list its ads on a limited list of publishers who have a specific range of traffic and user base.

So if that goes down it means our websites who make money out of Adsense are going to Go down, we will see more Public Service ads then the regular one, thus cutting down our revenue in return and we will be looking left and right for other options to make money out of the traffic on our web properties. Note when such a thing happens its the best time when local start ups are going to launch some service that will monopolize on this gap and maybe a new corporation gets founded. Most of the dot com successful start ups started during the dot com crash in 1990′s.

As they say “Recession is the best time of investment”, so this means one thing that the credit crunch has indeed caused a global recession for companies that are old and huge but it has also opened doors of opportunities for small companies to grow out big in this time of recession, meaning old giants to retire and new giants to emerge.